How We Created and Hosted Our First Webinar

A webinar is an online seminar. Until this semester I had never attended one. So, I find it pretty amazing that I helped host one on Wednesday for my Communication Technologies class.

The invitation to our first webinar for our group project

Every member in the group had a role such as speaker, moderator, or technical support. One of our members was in charge of social media communication through Twitter.

First, we created a content management document so we knew who our audience was, what we were to talk about, and the outcome we expected by hosting the webinar. This is an important step not to skip when creating anything, because it helps you keep focus on what is important. We did this step right away.

Second, we chose a webinar tool. We found a great one that offered a free 30-day trial. Attendees of the webinar can use the webinar tool without signing up for the trial. We sent invitation through the e-mail to the other groups in the class so they could attend. They would then register to attend our webinar.

Third, our speaker created a slideshow and an outline of what she was going to say during the presentation. Our assigned topic was applying audio technologies, one of the competencies of the class. We narrowed the topic down to specifically podcasting, especially for those who are new to the technology.


Next, we had to rehearse the webinar. We did this the day before to make sure we knew what we were doing and to hopefully fix any technical errors that may occur. Even though we rehearsed, we did have an issue with our audio the day of the presentation. We were able to resolve the issue within a few minutes fortunately.

During the webinar one of our group members was on Twitter. He asked some thought-provoking questions about our topic and answered questions attendees were asking. We chose a hashtag so we could keep a running conversation.

At the end of the webinar we sent a survey to the attendees so we could judge what we did well and what we could improve on. We signed up for a free SurveyMonkey account to create the survey.

I’m really proud of my group for pulling together and putting on a great presentation. I can now say that I’ve not only attended webinars, I’ve been involved in hosting one, too!

What do you think of webinars? Are they a useful tool? Are there any webinars you’ve attended that you would recommend?